Future Stock : The Best New Plants Being Tested at This North San Diego County Garden May Soon Be Appearing at Local Nurseries

CALIFORNIA gardens are changing, a fact dramatically demonstrated in a San Diego garden developed by plantsmen Charles Cozzens and Tom Muntean. The form and shape of the large, gently rolling terrain, the lack of lawn, the paths and especially the abundance of flowering plants are a look into the future of Southern California gardening. This , it seems likely, is what gardeners will be growing, and this is how we will be using the unusual mix of plants that thrive in our warm but mild climate.

Muntean and Cozzens’ Green Canyon Gardens is on a rural road in the north San Diego County town of Fallbrook. It is a private garden, a bold experimental plot where they try out new plants before using them in their clients’ gardens. Many of the plants seen here are so new to California that they are difficult, or impossible, to find. But Cozzens and Muntean are propagating their most promising discoveries (including most of the plants mentioned here) in one corner of the garden and making some of those plants available to retail nurseries. It is only a matter of time before gardeners will be able to buy the best of these.

Cozzens’ ideas for using and combining flowers will be useful to California gardeners looking for inspiration as the fall-planting season begins. The beds of Green Canyon Gardens are large--not only to help take the place of the lawn but also so that the gardeners have the room necessary to play one plant against another. After seeing Green Canyon, one’s own garden beds suddenly look quite cramped, and all that space devoted to lawn becomes suspect. Flowers, it seems, might be more rewarding for the time, effort and water involved.

Paths here are ample--wide and sure enough to steady a wheelbarrow--and they also help substitute for the lawn as they wind among the flowers. These paths beg to be followed, making the garden an adventure, with no shortage of plants awaiting discovery.

“People call ours an English garden,” Cozzens says, “but what does this mean? Only that we love flowers like the English and put them above everything else.” Flowers are clearly in control at the one-acre site (though a major portion of the garden is devoted to organically grown fruits and vegetables, which are in their own south-facing plot). Says Cozzens: “I try to balance the forms and colors of plants, but I feel it is simply the flowers themselves that make a garden buoyant and exciting.”

There is, of course, a house in this idyllic picture, and fences, for that matter, but they are not the background for the garden: Plant is seen against plant. The gardeners are careful not to locate too many things that bloom at the same time in one area, so those that are in flower stand out from the green (or sometimes gray) of those that are not.

It is Charles Cozzens’ pursuit of flowers that has put Green Canyon on the cutting edge of garden development--”I like to think of myself as a plantsman,” he says, “an avid collector of plants--always trying new things because you never know what will become the next Rhapiolepis, the next wonderful plant that will brighten every California garden. Right now, I’m trying everything.” Though there are plenty of commonplace plants, even petunias and marigolds, he likes to work with a broad palette. Cozzens subscribes to seed lists published by botanical gardens around the world and has helped fund plant-hunting and exploration trips, reaping some of the seed collected. He is particularly fascinated with the flora of central Chile, which is virtually unexplored; the coastal region has a climate very much like our own.

Such careful collecting has given Cozzens and Muntean a garden in which something is always in bloom. In most gardens, especially those that are not seasonally replanted with annuals and rely more on perennials and small shrubs, the initial spring burst of bloom soon peters out as the weather warms. But at Green Canyon Gardens, the summer--and even the fall--garden were the equal of spring. Note how the flower colors change dramatically--cool blues and pinks in spring turning to warm yellows and reds in summer.

Some of Cozzens’ most delightful discoveries were made relatively close to home. The most brilliant display in late summer and fall comes from the towering golden flowers of Helianthus angustifolius , the swamp sunflower, a native of the American Southeast. Cozzens has found that, like many flowers from that region and the Midwest, it does fine in Southern California, despite what the literature says. These plants are accustomed to hot summers, and all they need to thrive here is a little summer water. Swamp sunflowers are sturdy and bloom for eight weeks, making slowly spreading clumps. They are not “garden thugs,” according to Cozzens, but remain neat and tidy.

Heleniums, commonly called sneezeweeds, with their swept-back daisy flowers, are also strong summer performers at Green Canyon Gardens. Although native sneezeweeds grow in our own Sierra, Cozzens prefers the many Midwestern and Eastern varieties of Helenium autumnale. “We don’t know why these aren’t grown more in gardens,” Cozzens says. “They come in a wide range of summery and autumn-like colors and are native to the Great Plains--so they don’t mind heat in the least.”

These and the other summer-fall bloomers are best planted in the late fall because they then have all winter and spring to spread their roots in the search for moisture. When they bloom in the heat of summer and early fall, they will be strong and will not wilt.

Today, forward-looking California gardeners must take water use seriously. Practically nothing at Green Canyon Gardens is irrigated more than once a week. That’s partly because Cozzens is experimenting with plants from other low-rainfall parts of the world. A recent arrival from Australia, Helichrysum ‘Dargan Hill Monarch,’ brightens sections of Green Canyon Gardens with its yellow perennial strawflowers for much of spring and summer. It is now becoming available at nurseries.

Another striking drought-resistant newcomer is Hypoestes aristata , a compact shrub from South Africa. Its September flowers look like little lavender-purple ribbons tied to the bush (the common name is ribbon bush). “It has a penchant for being scraggly, but we pinch the new growth back to make it a tidy little bush that stays under 2 feet,” Cozzens says.

Sometimes it is not a new plant that grabs your attention at Green Canyon but rather the way Cozzens and Muntean are growing the familiar. To encourage the roses, Cozzens says, “we find they need a hard pruning in August as well as in January. That way we get exceptional flowers in fall and early winter and keep the plants lower and more useful to the landscape.” The same procedure works with dahlias, which are cut back almost to the ground after the first wave of flowers in early summer, so that a second wave can be enjoyed in the late summer and fall.

Tricks such as this recognize that the Southern California climate is different from that of the rest of the country. For us, right now is the beginning of a new gardening season, the perfect time to plant just about anything, even the whole garden, but especially the perennials and spring flowers, the small shrubs and California native plants that make this Fallbrook garden so special.